CLI Reference¶

Global options¶

Installing the package provides the modern-django-starter command.

Option	Description
`--version`	Show the installed version and exit
`--help`	Show command help and exit

modern-django-starter --version
modern-django-starter --help

`modern-django-starter create`¶

Creates a new Django project.

Usage: modern-django-starter create [OPTIONS] [PROJECT_NAME]

Arguments¶

Argument	Description
`PROJECT_NAME`	(optional) Name of the project. Must be a valid Python identifier (`snake_case`, cannot start with a digit). If omitted, you are prompted for it with a default of `my_django_project`.

Options¶

Option	Description
`-o, --output-dir PATH`	Directory to create the project in. Defaults to `.` (current directory).
`--api-only`	Generate an API-only project: a pure DRF backend with JWT auth, CORS, and drf-spectacular docs. No frontend or HTML templates are generated. See API-Only Projects.

# Create in the current directory
modern-django-starter create blog

# Create somewhere specific
modern-django-starter create blog --output-dir ~/code

# Short flag form
modern-django-starter create blog -o /tmp/projects

# API-only backend
modern-django-starter create blog_api --api-only

Interactive prompts¶

Everything else is selected through interactive prompts. The set of questions depends on whether --api-only was passed:

Question	Full mode choices	Default	API-only default
Docker support	yes / no	yes	yes
PostgreSQL	yes / no	yes	yes
PostgreSQL version	15, 16, 17, 18	18	18
Cloud provider	none, AWS, Azure, GCP, Render, Railway, PythonAnywhere, Fly.io, Dokku, Heroku	none	none
Storage provider	local, AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare R2	local	local
Email provider	none, SendGrid, Mailgun, SES, Postmark	none	none
Async support	yes / no	no	no
Django REST Framework	yes / no	yes	always enabled
Celery	yes / no	yes	no
Sentry	yes / no	yes	no
Stripe	yes / no	no	no
Frontend pipeline	none, webpack, vite, parcel	vite	always none
CI tool	none, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Travis, CircleCI	GitHub Actions	none

About defaults

In full mode Celery, Sentry, and CI default to yes; in API-only mode they default to no to keep the backend minimal. DRF and the frontend pipeline are fixed in API-only mode (DRF = yes, pipeline = none).

Confirmation summary¶

Before anything is written, the CLI prints a summary table of every selected option and asks for confirmation:

Generate project 'my_project'? [y/n] (y):

Answering no cancels the run (exit code 0) without writing any files.

Exit codes¶

Code	Meaning
`0`	Success, or generation explicitly cancelled
`1`	Invalid project name, or an error occurred during generation